Karain : un souvenir, de Joseph Conrad, ou les aventures d’une goélette hétérotopique

In Joseph Conrad’s Karain: A Memory, the anonymous schooner of the narrator-captain has three main functions: a gorgeous stage on which the Malay Rajah Karain struts in the daytime with his retinue, a means of commercial transportation when it simply plies arms trafficking in a region hotly disputed by Western powers, a restricted, confined space at night when Karain finally tells the story of the ghost which haunts him. This “piece of floating space” is highly plastic, oscillating between openness and closure, exposure and recoil, appearances and depth, frame narrative and framed narrative whose “effect” on listeners is both ineffable and undying, ghostly and real in the making of memory, within what Rilke calls a “community” of experience.